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     Keith Jason Wikle

Saramago and Tolkien page 3     
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          If The Lord of the Rings is truly a myth, and suggesting that Blindness is a myth too, what similarities do they have? Are the qualities of myth merely in the generalities - long lost ages, places with people that are unknown to us doing extra-ordinary things? As Campbell defines the origins of myth, “The symbols of mythology are not manufactured, they cannot be ordered, or permanently suppressed, they are spontaneous productions of the psyche and each bears the germ of its source.” By finding similarity between the characters and plot, we find mutual ground to support the narrative symbology of the myth that is The Lord of the Rings in its telling, and the myth that is at the end of Blindness. Saramago, with the specific tools of his craft, creates a world barren of symbols and meaning for his characters and readers to draw on, he does this by leaving certain parts of his canvas blank. The place where this story takes place is unnamed. This in and of itself is unusual, as Saramago set so many of his other stories in Portugal, and Lisbon specifically served as starting point for nearly all of the Saramago novels I read. The History of the Siege of Lisbon, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, and The Stone Raft all feature Portugal and Lisbon to a greater or lesser extent. However, by intentionally removing the specificity of “the where”, we are left to imagine that the events of Blindness could happen anywhere. The streets and buildings in the book smack of Europe, but do not suggest much else, much as Tolkien defined Middle-Earth the idyllic English countryside he knew in childhood, AKA the Shire. But by removing the inhabitants and replacing them with hobbits he refused to be pegged down on it being any one place, rather than an amalgamation of ideal places he conceived or experienced. The forests inhabited by the elves also lean toward the boreal fantasy of England and northern Europe. Rivendell or Lorien is the pinnacle of these Avalon-like places where no one grows old, and those that are wounded are healed. Due to the dreary darkness and utter ruin of the circumstances of the story, Blindness most closely resembles the dark lands of Mordor, where nothing grows and everything is covered in filth. It did not strike me at first, but upon a second reading, the unnamed city that the unnamed characters stumble through blindly reminds me most specifically of the last march on Mordor. In Mordor and the unnamed city there is no food, no water, but instead only dust and waste.
          The evil minions of Sauron, the unseen Dark Lord, beset Sam and Frodo on all sides. Orcs, Nazgul, and Shelob darken every step the hobbits make towards the Cracks of Doom. Blindness gathers the unnamed characters together much in the same way Fellowship does, by necessity and chance rather than deliberate choice of the best and brightest. The Doctor’s wife, the Doctor, the Girl with the Dark Glasses, the Old Man, the Boy with the Squint, and the Thief are then trapped in quarantine within the abandoned asylum. Inside these walls they are overrun by every evil that humans are capable of. On the outside, the building is guarded by the ever-present military. The army gives little hope for salvation, shelling out meager food and potable water, and the dictum that they must bury their dead without ceremony. Tolkien’s Mordor is perforated with the description of the landscape and its bleak hopelessness, and utter despair under the rule of Sauron and his minions.
          In many myths, one character is set apart from the rest to bear a burden for the others. In The Lord of the Rings, the unwilling Frodo steps forward to carry the One Ring, forward into Mordor to cast it into the Cracks of Doom and thereby unmake it and destroy Sauron. This burden is a heavy one for Frodo, who has never been outside of the Shire and is just beginning to understand the wide world and the beauty and evil it holds. Yet he goes forth willingly to fulfill his part in the epic or die trying. Saramago’s characters typically tend towards timid male copy editors, civil servant, or doctors, but Blindness puts a woman forward to carry the story, the ophthalmologist's wife, or "The Doctor's Wife." The Doctor’s Wife holds a position in Blindness similar to Frodo’s in TLotR; she is forced to bear the burden of sight while all others are blind. When her husband first went blind, she did not, but pretended to be blind in order to be with him. She intended to see the blindness through to the end, much in the same way Frodo couldn’t be rid of Sam Gamgee at any turn. And so she must bear witness to the inside of the asylum where they are quarantined. She apart from all others must see the death, the filth, the utter depravation and descent into hell they endure, for she cannot have the mercy of blindness. She must see for all the others, helping them to the toilet, to food, and salvation from the miscreants they are interned with. Finally, it is not her sight, but mercy on the blind that delivers them from doom and allows the epidemic to pass.

 

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